BOOK: Passing Through
AUTHOR: Colin Channer
PUBLISHER: Ballantine Books/One World
I FINISHED Passing Through on Port Royal Street in downtown Kingston, leaning against a wall of the Bank of Nova Scotia. I got strange looks from passers-by, but it was well worth it.
I would not be as melodramatic to say I needed the reassurance and support of 'you're safe with us' to make it through the ending of Passing Through, where all the twists, turns and futile turning back along the straight path of history converge in the reversed roles of the white (on the face of it), St. William Rawle and his black servant, mistress and, in the end, comforter, Estrella.
Passing Through is the production of a grown-up (figuratively speaking, of course) Colin Channer, who tackles race, social structure, relationships, politics, loss, the frustration and danger of intellectual enterprise in a 'dunce' society, religion and marriage in seven short stories, which cascade into each other much like a seven drop waterfall, a 'letter to the editor' forming the pool for each pause.
While the stories, set mainly in the mythical San Carlos but with references - factual ones - to 'other' Caribbean islands, are in sequence they are not consecutive, like train cars. Much like Marley's albums for Island Records, they are self-contained explorations which, taken as a whole, tell a sweeping tale, encompassing in scope yet intense in detail.
MARLEY TITLES
While Channer has expanded beyond Marley titles of previous books Waiting In Vain and Satisfy My Soul he has not left out the Gong. In fact, earlier this year during a brief residency he read Revolution, which includes a 'brush' between Rawle and Marley just before the 'Natty Dread' album, at the UWI's Undercroft. Rawle observes Marley's interaction with a woman he had tried to seduce and understands "he had the charisma of the revolutionary, the capacity to embrace and rebuke without apology, which is rooted in the understanding that life is a cycle of regeneration, and that regeneration is a cycle of pain, and that the great leaders are those who can inspire people to face the coming pain with strength and grace and a vision of life beyond it."
The development of places on San Carlos is fascinating; we see a mangrove semi-swamp where a priest named Blackwell lived in the opening story, The High Priest of Love, at the beginning of the 20th Century, becoming a tourism hot spot by the end.
CLASS AND COLOUR
However, what is truly intriguing is the interconnectedness of the lives of the people on San Carlos, no matter how, on the face of it, they are separated by class and colour. The links are sometimes made in the most off-hand ways; such as in the title story, where a Mrs. Chang informs a visitor, Cornelia, at dinner that "Estrella - she learned to read in the back of my father's shop. My baby sister used to teach her".
Those lessons were taught in the previous story, Girl With The Golden Shoes; those dreams of a young Negrita, hell on heels when aroused, of owning shoes are realised and more by 1982 in How I Met My Husband, when her son Albert Dominguez runs her store 'Miss Estrella's Art and Craft - and English Shoes'.
It is quite possible to read the individual stories in the collection on their own, but that would be much like an instant orgasm - peaking without the climb.
After all, it is the journey that counts.
Channer employs formidable powers of description in Passing Through, giving details that would have pleased Eddie Blackwell, who "living as he did before the camera was a common object, he built a book of memories in his mind."
The result is a stunning series of verbal still shots, at many times underpinned by an insight into history or culture. One of these is Cornelia looking at coconut trees stricken by lethal yellowing and making a mental leap to a lynching where a black man's severed penis was rammed in his mouth. She recalls when someone told her "If one day someone gathered all them lynching poles, I tell you, Miss Cornelia, all across the South, and put 'em all together in a single field, it would look just like the woods when the winter comes. Like this, she thought, like this".
Sex is to Channer what chicken is to Colonel Sanders - barbecued, fried, in parts or whole, fowl is fowl - so it is no surprise that Passing Through contains a healthy dose of the ins and outs of the business.
And it is not just the "in and out - out and in - like sorting bags of mail" that takes place between Dominguez and Estrella on their first encounter (she cuts it short with a well-positioned knife), stuff that lives up to the opening lines of the title story: "All sex involves perversion. It's a matter of degree." So there is a soppy lesbian scene and a triple finger shot of postillionage (hey, I did not know that word before Sunday's 'Your Doctor Says' in the Sunday Gleaner either.
In the final letter to the editor, Channer himself seems to speak most clearly through Shooky Dominguez (by this time the political, economic and racial power structure in San Carlos has totally changed), the writer and patron of the arts who is a natural successor to St. William Rawle, as he protests the paltry sum offered for a literary prize. He writes much as Channer would probably speak as he oversees an instalment of the Calabash International Literary Festival in Treasure Beach with a half-smile and half-open eyes: "Open up the pipes and let the money flow. What are we hoarding it for? We can't take it with us. And who knows when life is going to end. We're not here forever. We're all just passing through."
CONTENTS
Letter to the Editor
The High Priest of Love
Letter to the Editor
The Girl With The Golden Shoes
Letter to the Editor
Passing Through
Revolution
Letter to the Editor
How I Met My Husband
Letter to the Editor
Poetic Justice
Letter to the Editor
Judgment Day
I Just Might Go to Jail for This Letter to the Editor
- Mel Cooke
